Quickly acknowledge and resolve issues that Google reports to you, such as downed feeds or unparseable CAP content.

Publish periodic test alerts

Work with your Google Team to agree on a testing schedule, especially if you only occasionally publish alerts.

Please follow these testing guidelines:

Always use <status>Test</status> to prevent the public from seeing test alerts. You should also verify that your other distribution channels respect the Test flag too.

Create test alerts for your most extreme event types.

Publish test CAP alerts to your normal production feed, not a staging or test environment.

You may use actual info from a past event, but ensure <sent>, <effective>, and <expires> times are current to the test.

Issue at least one test update, cancellation, or all-clear message along with the initial test alert to be sure that the updating mechanism is working as intended.

We’ll follow up with you after the test to confirm whether we ingested the alerts successfully, or to report any issues that should be resolved.

Notify Google Public Alerts of changes

To ensure that end users continue to receive correct alerting information, we
recommend that you establish public or clear mechanisms to notify Google and the
public about updates to your CAP format or additional data.